Power of One

Forty-plus brand websites, no shared infrastructure, and an 18-month migration every time a brand needed to move.

The Travel Corporation operates 42 travel brands across 60+ countries, including Trafalgar and Contiki, carrying over 2 million travellers annually. The group specialises in organised, guided touring, and every brand in it ran on its own stack.

Company	The Travel Corporation (42 travel brands, including Insight Vacations, Luxury Gold, Contiki, Costsaver, and Trafalgar)
Role	Lead Product Designer
Team	Founding designer, scaling to a team of 3 Product Designers and one researcher based in London and Katowice, within a wider cross-functional task force of 22
Timeframe	Feb 2020 – Dec 2021

The goal: Build a single B2C ecommerce platform and design system capable of serving the entire portfolio without rebuilding for each brand. I came in as the founding designer on it.

In late 2019, 80–90% of bookings happened through agents or by phone. Each brand had built its own website independently over 10+ years. The result was duplicated decisions, inconsistent patterns, and no shared infrastructure.

COVID halted travel in early 2020 but opened a window: customers were moving online and competitors were waiting. If TTC could shift to a genuine B2C model before the recovery, it would come out of the pandemic ahead.

The executive team had approved PO1 before COVID hit. When the pandemic forced cost cuts, the data team and additional design resource were removed from the programme. I joined in February 2020 as the founding designer and pressed ahead.

The biggest risk was political rather than technical. Brand CMOs had defended their decisions for over a decade, and “we’ve always done it this way” was the default response to change.

We ran analytics audits across all 40+ brands and put each brand’s conversion data next to competitor benchmarks. That moved the conversation from opinion to evidence. The pitch to the executive steering group was that the legacy stack had become a commercial liability.

That framing secured clean-sheet approval, and it was the hardest sell of the project.

The design system had to work for brands as diverse as a luxury escorted-touring company (65+) to a youth-adventure brand (18–30). Too rigid and brand teams would reject it. Too flexible and it would fragment within months.

I separated structure from style using a three-layer token architecture:

• Primitive tokens: raw values with no context, covering the colour palette, spacing scale, type scale and grid
• Semantic tokens: values named by purpose, so colour roles (primary action, surface, text), focus and state colours, and typographic roles
• Brand theme layer: brand identity applied by overriding semantic tokens only. Trafalgar maps primary action to navy, Contiki maps it to orange

One change at the core propagates across every brand. Each brand can update its identity without touching the underlying system. The system shipped with 40 components, each built once and reused across every brand.

Title: Lead Product Designer. Founding designer on the central PO1 task force, scaling to three product designers and a researcher across London and Katowice, within a wider cross-functional group of 22.

What I owned:

• UX architecture across the full booking journey
• Design system built from scratch, documented in Figma, Storybook and Zeroheight
• Discovery research sprint (15+ user interviews, competitor benchmarking)
• The five design principles that governed every decision for the life of the programme
• Stakeholder alignment across 40+ brand CMOs and the executive steering group
• The analytics audit that secured executive approval for the clean-sheet approach
• Weekly design-data-engineering sync, established six weeks in when parallel workstreams began to diverge

What I contributed to:

• Scope governance, the framework that blocked feature creep throughout delivery
• Brand migration process at each stage

Why this role needed lead-level thinking: 40+ brand stakeholders defended 10+ years of legacy decisions. The role required someone who could challenge opinion with evidence, design at a systems level, and operate as a strategic partner to product and engineering leadership. A senior IC focused on screens alone wouldn’t have moved the organisational blockers.

Leadership mode: Design Architect setting standards for the programme. IC on high-stakes features. Design Lead directing a distributed team.

The pivot: Three months in, the business rejected my original proposal. A PWA with a stepper booking flow was too unfamiliar. I refactored to familiar web patterns while keeping the performance improvements underneath. The lesson was that brand stakeholders made visual decisions, so high-fidelity mockups unlocked approval where abstract architecture never did.

Stakeholder management: I presented bi-weekly to the leadership quartet (Global CEO, CTO, CDO, Programme Director) and monthly to the full CMO group. Each steering meeting opened with a one-sheeter re-anchoring the group on the five design principles before reviewing progress. That ritual blocked scope drift at executive level before it reached the team.

Standards I set: Five design principles used as decision filters for the entire programme. Every scope request was tested against them. “Does this serve B2C conversion?” ended most additions quickly.

Five decision filters, applied at every fork in the road:

1. Start from a clean sheet. No legacy decisions inherited by default
2. Design for B2C only. No hybrid compromises
3. Prioritise performance and conversion over aesthetic preference
4. Validate assumptions before building
5. Build once, reuse everywhere

Analysing brands in isolation had hidden the biggest drop-off causes. They only became visible at portfolio level:

1. Navigation and search was the single biggest friction point across the portfolio. This shaped the information architecture on every template.
2. Price clarity. Users couldn’t distinguish price-per-person from total trip cost. This drove a dedicated pricing pattern across all tour pages.
3. Booking confidence. Unclear group sizes caused heavy drop-off. This shaped the social proof and group dynamics content on every tour page.

PWA vs. familiar web patterns. The first direction was a PWA with a stepper booking flow. The business rejected it as too far from what the brands knew. I refactored to familiar patterns while keeping the performance improvements underneath. The trade-off: a more conservative visual approach in exchange for faster approval and delivery.

Design system first vs. later. On a tight deadline, building the system upfront felt like a risk. I did it anyway. Every migration after the first paid back the investment.

Mobile-first vs. desktop-first. Research showed users started on mobile but completed bookings on desktop, which is typical of high-consideration purchases where people switch to a larger screen to review details and commit. I designed mobile-first to ensure the entry point was solid, then scaled up. This shaped scroll depth and information hierarchy across every template.

Metric	Result
Brand migration time	6 weeks (was 18 months)
Baseline conversion	+12% across five pilots
Annual saving	£2M
Page load performance	+40%
Design-to-dev handoff	-70%

Pilot brands in sequence: Insight Vacations, Luxury Gold, Contiki, Costsaver, Trafalgar.

The £2M annual saving came from centralising design and engineering. Previously every brand duplicated the same work for every new feature. PO1 replaced that model with a single component library of 40 components, built once and reused across the portfolio via the token architecture. That eliminated per-brand infrastructure and production costs entirely.

Metric	Result
WCAG 2.1 AA compliance	30% to 95%
Bounce rate	-15%
Average time on tour pages	3min 47sec (excl. bounces)

We set RAQ (request a quote) as the north star at MVP rather than booking conversion. A £5k+ guided tour is researched over weeks and rarely bought in a session, so a booking metric would have measured the wrong thing and pushed the design toward the wrong behaviour. RAQ settled at 0.22%.

The number I’d point to is dwell time. Three minutes forty-seven on a tour page, excluding bounces, is a long time to spend on something you aren’t seriously considering.

• First enterprise-wide design system for a group carrying 2M+ travellers
• One design team capable of supporting 40+ brands
• A repeatable discovery and validation process embedded across every brand migration
• Formal scope governance that blocked feature creep throughout delivery

When I left, the system ran without me.

• Instrument analytics earlier. We added tracking after launch, which left the early pilot data incomplete. Tracking requirements belong in the design system from day one.
• Map stakeholders before opening Figma. I underestimated brand politics in the first six weeks. Too much time designing, not enough time pre-selling the clean-sheet principle. A structured stakeholder mapping exercise at the start would have saved weeks.
• Protect the research budget. The business cut the data team as a COVID cost measure. Usability and guerrilla testing worked, but never reached the primary demographic: 60+ year-olds booking £5k+ trips. I should have pushed harder to protect that budget when the cuts came.

On a project like this the design is not the output that matters most. The governance model, the principles used as decision filters and the scope document treated as a contract had more long-term impact than any individual component. They are what let the work carry on after I left.

The token architecture is built for visual consistency. The next step is instrumented components: design tokens tied to analytics so teams can measure component performance in production. With enough platform data, the infrastructure exists to move from pattern reuse to personalised journey assembly.